Communication Breakdown. Daily Prompt.

So you’re a living, breathing organism and you can communicate in many a number of fantastic ways. You speak at least three languages (your native tongue, your body language, the language of love!) and yet…sometimes there are walls of silence that seem like they just can’t be climbed.

Why?

Well there are circumstances in which creativity and communications flourish. These are circumstances of ease and color, of trust, mutual respect, openness and safety, like a flowery garden on a summer day where animals bask and the lemonade flows. These are the environments you want to find yourself in.

There are also circumstances where the very opposite is true. These are circumstances of difficulty and stale, colorless air. Some part of the communication tunnel has dropped its window to respect, made trust impossible, closed the doors to understanding and shut the listening vents. These are circumstances everyone wants to avoid.

The biggest factors in creating a breeding ground for the kind of negative energy that leads to the unwanted communication zone are as follows: anger, authoritarianism, irrationality, impatience- and the root cause and catalyst for all of these is stress.

When you’re stressed and unhappy you are more likely to be impatient and to try and exert control and authority over people rather than level with them, talk about things rationally. You get irrational, and impatient and you anger easily. That isn’t an excuse however, we must all take responsibility for our own stress management.

Imagine trying to have a relaxing chat with someone outside during a thunder storm – how is that going to go? Not well.

If you’ve taken on too much, if you’ve lost control, if you’re running on empty and you’re struggling, the key word here is you. You need to to take a break, slow down, reflect, find some inner peace, ask for help if you need to. Only then when you get back out of the storm inside yourself are you in a place for rational communication and seeing other people as equals enough to allow them space to communicate freely with you.

We all come in to contact now and again with someone who is in this stress zone, who has rigid views and does not listen, who treats others like they are gum on the ground to be trod on and spat down at. They turn normally excellent communicators into whisperers.

Sometimes we just have to wait it out, other times we have to get out, maybe you have a magical knack at helping people to de-stress and can overcome it. The pitfall a lot of people get in to is thinking that every environment is like this or they blame themselves for not being able to rise above it. Sometimes the wall is just too high, but there are better environments, there are places to flourish. Find them.